Urban Displacement in Detroit and the Erasure of African American Communities

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Urban Erasures and Contested Memorial Assemblages" session, at the 2019 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology.

Urban historical archaeology has been practiced in Detroit by professionals for over 60 years now. So why is it that less than a handful of sites or landscapes associated with the city’s African American communities, (who make up over 80% of the population), have ever been examined archaeologically?  The answers are partly rooted in a complicated legacy of exclusionary practices by politicans, developers, and citizens, who have actively whitewashed the urban landscape over the past century, displacing communities and their contested histories in the process. But also complicit in these erasures are historic preservationists and archaeologists, who have maintained rather conservative standards of practice with regards to establishing significance and privileging excavation-based recoveries. Focusing on two sites of displacement in Detroit, this presentation demonstrates some of the valuable contributions of contemporary archaeology in recognizing erasures and their aftermaths.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for Historical Archaeology 2019   •
• Urban Erasures and Contested Memorial Assemblages

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Individual & Institutional Roles

Contact(s): Society for Historical Archaeology

Record Identifiers

PaperId(s): 201